First class: what I've seen and from what I've seen what I liked and did not like

After our first class we were asked: "in what we have seen in schools, what did we like and dislike?"

When it comes to what I liked, I definitely approved of group assessment. For music, often a form of assessment is the dreaded playing test. Rather than having students test by themselves in-front of the class, which I have seen many teachers do, a few teachers would assess by using a playing test in two different variations: one would be with pre-selected groups, and the second would be random group selection right on the spot. A playing test in-front of the entire class would make any student (even any professional musician for that matter) nervous, but to play with several other musicians/students at the same time, takes away the fear of everyone hearing you. The teachers would have the groups repeat the test twice, and would use their ears to assess each student individually. Not only does this benefit the students, it also saves the teacher a large amount of assessment time.

What I did not enjoy has been the lack of planning toward the PLO's. Often I have seen too many teachers create their curriculum and then insert the PLO's into that, rather than designing their curriculum to meet the PLO's. I find the students do not learn as much when the curriculum is created first, as there is no real end goals for the students, rather just what the teacher would like to do. I find this also gives students sometimes (definitely not always) a blind view of the world of music, as often most curriculum first classrooms just focus on instrumental performance, and not the various other aspects of music.

Although there are more things I could say, I find these two points address key issues that are important to me and are a large part of my teaching philosophy: student comfort in assessment (although there are times when students need a gentle push out of their comfort zones, playing tests are one place where I feel staying within those boundaries are a good idea) and having end goals for your students (generally I find ones set out by the government are good to follow).